Trade and professional associations
(Conferences, meetings and seminars)
Trade and professional associations
(Services)
Trade and professional associations
(Social aspects)
Parapsychology
(Conferences, meetings and seminars)
Parapsychology
(Forecasts and trends)

When J. B. Rhine proposed the formation of the Parapsychological
Association (PA) in 1957, he intended that the organisation be both a
professional and an international group, in order to better promote
communication between the scattered academics working in the field. The
following year, 1958, the first PA convention was held at Duke
University in North Carolina, in the US. Despite being an international
body the PA was at that time, and has always been, a predominantly
American organisation, and approximately half of the current 320 members
live in the United States. Naturally, then, the first six PA conventions
were held in the US, until 1964 when my good friend Steve Abrams, who
was doing his PhD in parapsychology at Oxford at the time, was able to
organise the first overseas event from there.

From then on, the convention returned to the US for three
consecutive years and was then hosted by a foreign country every fourth
year, switching to once every three years in Europe from 1991, until
finally in 2000 it began alternating evenly each year across the
Atlantic. So far, outside of the US, the annual PA convention has been
hosted by the UK, Germany, Holland, Iceland, Canada, France, Austria,
and Sweden, but has never yet left the northern hemisphere.

I'm pleased to say that, with the support of my board and my
good colleagues here in Brazil, I spearheaded the move to have the PA
fully engage with its international objective and host the convention
beyond the usual Euro-American confines. This manoeuvre somewhat
disrupted the comfortable back and forth pattern, causing quite some
unexpected commotion last year at the PA business meeting in Paris,
regarding where the next convention location would be. Europeans.
tussled with North Americans for their turn next, now that the cycle had
been broken. Fortunately there were neither baguettes nor bagels thrown,
but I had not anticipated such a disagreement, and I diplomatically
opted to let the board decide later instead of there and then, rather
than face half an angry crowd whichever way the issue was resolved. I
am, nevertheless, extremely pleased that PA members get very passionate
about where the next convention will be held.

Bringing the PA's annual event to Brazil, however, was for me
the obvious thing to do. Having visited here in 2008 for the 4th Psi
Meeting and 3rd Journey Into Altered States, I was immediately impressed
by the great enthusiasm for parapsychology among Brazilians, and deeply
enamoured with the earnest and concerted efforts to legitimise the field
among researchers here, especially Wellington Zangari and Fatima Machado
of the University of Sao Paulo, and Alexander Moreira-Almeida of the
Federal University of Juiz de Fora. I was also hugely compelled by the
excellent organisation of the joint Brazilian events by Fabio da Silva,
one of Professor Zangari's parapsychology PhD students at USP.

The incorporation, quite literally at some points, of the 3rd
Journey Into Altered States into the Brazilian parapsychology meeting
added a much-needed experiential dimension to all the heady intellectual
presentations that are typically delivered at an academic conference.
And this is the true difference between Brazil and other countries in
which the PA has been hosted: that many people here do not just explore
parapsychology as an academic discipline, they attempt to live it as a
dimension of their personal belief system. For Brazil, as you may have
noticed, has one of the most open minded, diverse and progressive
approaches to different religious practices, towards paranormal
phenomena, and towards the often fraught relationship between science
and spirituality.

Here at the PA we are typically scientists first and foremost--no
matter what else we are--but the advantage of studying parapsychology in
a country like Brazil is that there is no shortage of natural phenomena
to study, and the amount of people both believing in and experiencing
the paranormal are easily in the majority. This is truly an anomaly in a
country as developed as it is. For instance, in a survey conducted by
Fatima Machado (2010) here recently (as reported by Wellington Zangari
this morning) an extraordinary 80-90% of Brazilians reported having had
a psi experience.

Typically, we also find the same types of anomalous phenomena here
that we find elsewhere in the world, such as the everyday occurrence of
apparently psychic episodes, out-of-body experiences, near-death
experiences, et cetera, but there are also occurrences of less common
phenomena such as poltergeist-like manifestations and, something
especially Brazilian, we also have psychic surgery (for a review of some
famous Brazilian cases of the above phenomena see Playfair, 1975).
There's also the common and widespread practice of mediumship,
perhaps here more than anywhere else in the developed world: such as
among the two million or more practising Spiritists in Brazil, who even
have mediums working alongside psychiatrists in Spiritist mental health
hospitals, helping to remedy otherwise conventionally untreatable cases
of schizophrenia and other problematic disorders (e.g., see Luke, 2009;
Silveira, 2008). Some of our delegates were earlier this week treated to
a visit to a local institute to witness this extraordinary
institutionalised mental health practice.

We also find that the events on offer alongside this conference
occur readily here in Curitiba and all over Brazil, such as Umbanda
trance incorporation rituals (Giesler, 1985) and the drinking of
psychoactive jungle decoctions such as the one once called telepathine
by chemists, now typically called ayahuasca, yage, or Daime (Luke,
2011b). This is because these ancient techniques of utilising altered
states of consciousness for healing, which is what they are intended
for, never left the culture here in Brazil--despite the modernisation
that has seen such practices die away in many parts of the world,
particularly in North America and Europe.

In many cases such traditional healing practices were actually
actively killed off, for example by the Inquisition, which all but ended
much of this type of approach to healing in Euro-America, and since then
the hegemony of the medical establishment has continued with that
process in recent centuries but in a somewhat less brutal fashion.
Nevertheless, as a concurrent outgrowth of the scientific age we had the
establishment of psychical research in the UK some 130 years ago, which
has continued to thrive, particularly in recent years, in the form of
the academic study of parapsychology (Luke, 2011c).

One of the developments occurring in the UK, perhaps partly as a
reaction to the rise of parapsychology and psychical research, is the
growth of anomalistic psychology. There is the need for some explanation
here when I talk about anomalistic psychology, because I am using that
term in a rather restricted sense. I am sure that in the minds of many
here, you see the research that you do as anomalistic psychology, in
that you scientifically study psychological experiences and phenomena of
an anomalous nature. And I am aware that many researchers in our field
who are sympathetic or at least open to the psi hypothesis like to use
this term, but I am using the term anomalistic psychology here to apply
to the so-called skeptics who research in this field and adopt the term
exclusively to that of parapsychology, because they have a prejudice
against the very notion of psi.

So while some respected researchers in our midst like to use this
anomalistic psychology term, in my mind, and for the purposes of this
talk, it has come to represent the prejudged and prejudiced type of
psychological approach that supposes that paranormal belief is
degenerate and that paranormal experiences are delusional. And it is
this academic shadow of parapsychology that is seemingly also growing,
in the UK at the very least.

So while anomalistic psychology has the objective of reducing the
unknown to the known--as Professor Zangari (2011) reminded us
yesterday--there is an inherent danger of assuming that we really do
fully comprehend the universe already, which, at its core, projects a
sort of ignorant arrogance, because, for me at least, the more I learn
the more I realise how little I know. Now, obviously the findings of
anomalistic psychology, and that of parapsychology, serve an extremely
important function in helping us to understand "what looks like psi
but isn't." And I have an enormous amount of respect for the
late Professor Bob Morris, and others (e.g., Pekala & Cardena,
2000), for ceaselessly determining these criteria, but Morris
didn't leave the research there (and neither would Zangari), and he
would also consider "what looks like psi and, given that we've
ruled out other factors, it probably is."

But for researchers to restrict an approach to a purely
disconfirmatory agenda would be throwing the baby out with the bath
water, or at least wilfully not checking to see if the baby is in the
bath first, because we just don't like children. Essentially then,
by restricting the agenda to maintaining that paranormal experiences
really are just normal experiences--and not potentially phenomena
currently inexplicable by scientific knowledge--the paranormal
experience itself is being wholly appropriated by the socalled skeptical
anomalistic psychology community. As such I am calling for the
reclamation of "the experience" from anomalistic psychology,
which is pushing to make us all believe that anyone having an anomalous
experience is cognitively faulty. Thus, from this perspective, all
experiencers are suffering from some sort of misperception,
misremembering, poor judgement, fantasy, faulty reasoning,
self-delusion, deception, fraud, or coincidence. Of course, all these
considerations are valid, because they do sometimes occur, but,
problematically, they are all too often offered as whole and complete
explanations for all phenomena by so-called skeptics. The
"experience" has all but been swept up and dumped into a
filing cabinet labelled as "broken brain."

Paranoid Normality: Why They Don't See What Is There

Take Richard Wiseman's (2011) latest best-selling book on
anomalistic psychology that came out this year, Paranormality: Why We
See What Isn't There. It gestures towards legitimate science but
without actually taking a balanced or even an empirical viewpoint on
certain experiences. For instance, the neat explanation given for the
great prevalence among the public for reports of precognitive dreams is
that, yes, these experiences occur with some degree of frequency, but,
no, they are not paranormal, they are just coincidental. In this view,
dreams of future events are merely products of the law of truly large
numbers, that is, that given that enough people are having dreams each
night then the probability of someone dreaming a particular future event
is almost certain.

Wiseman takes the example of the numerous people who reported
precognitive dreams about the 1967 Aberfan disaster in Wales that killed
128 children in a school when a landslide destroyed the building.
According to the rationale, the average person has 60 years of adult
dreaming in their lifetime, 365 days of the year, which equates to
roughly 22,000 nights of dreams. Assuming that events like the Aberfan
disaster only occur once in each generation, and the average person only
dreams of such a disaster once in a lifetime then the odds of such a
dream are 22,000 to 1. Then, considering that there were about 45
million Britons in 1966, this equates to roughly 2,000 people dreaming
the Aberfan disaster. According to Wiseman, the law of truly large
numbers accounts for Barker's (1967) seemingly impressive
collection of 36 dreams of the Aberfan disaster before it happened.

There's some faulty logic at work in all of this. What is
meant by generation in this context? Should we expect 2,000 people to
dream the Aberfan disaster or to just dream of some disaster, as
supposedly only occurs once in a lifetime, according to Wiseman?
Wiseman's calculation also assumes that the coincidence of the
dream and the event can occur any time throughout one's lifetime.
Clearly though, the dream didn't occur at any time in the entire
lifespan of 45 million Britons, it happened on one day when some of them
were old and some were young, so it's unsound to use entire
lifetime calculations for a cross section of the population. Dreaming of
the disaster after the event doesn't really count as precognition,
does it? So it rather depends on the average age of people when they
have such dreams, not how long they live for (Luke, in press). I could
go on.

Not only does this example demonstrate the inherently dodgy use of
estimated probabilities in this sort of reasoning, but Wiseman (2011)
and many other anomalistic psychologists (e.g., Blackmore, 1990; Charpak
& Broch, 2004; Esgate & Groome, 2001; Hines, 2003; Mueller &
Roberts, 2001; Zusne & Jones, 1989) utterly fail to consider any
genuine experimental research into dream ESP, and rely solely on
subjective estimates of probability and subsequently dubious
calculations, all of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, are completely
different from one researcher to another. Consequently, 50 years or so
of diligent experimental dream research using clear objective
probabilities, conducted since the start of Stan Krippner's era at
Maimonides, is completely ignored at the expense of some logically
sketchy tales. All this despite the call from skeptic Michael Shermer
(1997, p.48) that the study of paranormal beliefs needs "controlled
experiments, not anecdotes." I assume Shermer is using the term
anecdote in the common use of the word as a story told without any
evidence to back it up, rather than in the literal sense of the word, of
an account that remains unpublished.

The major problem with Wiseman's (2011) proposal that such
precognitive dreams occur but once in a lifetime is that this estimation
is also plucked out of an intellectual vacuum. Reclaiming the dream
experience, if you were to work with, record, and study your dreams
every day as I did for just 18 months, then you might actually discover,
as did I, that on average 1 dream in 10 had some compelling precognitive
component. I am not the only one who reports this either, as we have
comparable figures from other dream diary studies (e.g., Bender, 1966;
de Pablos, 1998, 2002). While such self-reports are not evidential, can
the law of truly large numbers actually account for these rates of
occurrence? Indeed, suggesting that such frequent occurrences are
expected by chance is essentially the opposite of what psychiatrist
Klaus Conrad (1958) somewhat oddly called apophenia, the discovery of
patterns in (apparently) random data. Perhaps we should call this
opposite phenomenon of attributing chance probability to (apparently)
related phenomena randomania, as a label for believing that everything
one cannot currently explain is just due to chance and coincidence. One
assumes that such a condition derives from a deep-seated rejection and
fear of the paranormal--which I'll come back to--a kind of paranoid
normality.

Experiential Reclamation: Repossessing Possession and Other
Anomalies

Essentially though, for me, Wiseman's assumed rarity among
individuals (though not populations) of precognitive dreams indicates
the importance of truly getting inside our subject matter. I don't
have to take somebody else's word for it that 10% of their dreams
are seemingly precognitive when I can experience it for myself. There
are other advantages to pursuing this line of personal research too, in
that the subtleties of negotiating the dream psi experience can also
teach us about the firstperson process involved in the experience and,
perhaps, even teach us something about ourselves too (e.g., Luke, 2005).
So what I am asking for is the reclamation of the anomalous experience
from anomalistic psychology. Yes parapsychology studies anomalous
experiences too--though mainly in other people--but the field seems
increasingly to retreat further away from the lived experience and
towards the abstract, objective experimental domain, often to the point
where the personal meaningfulness of the task for the participant has
been all but squeezed out. This year's banquet speaker, Michael
Winkelman, nailed this nicely earlier today (Winkehnan, 2011) by
indicating the importance of ecological validity in relation to Carlos
Alberto Tinoco's comments that his own ayahuasca-drinking ESP
participants much preferred to enjoy their visions than engage with his
psi task (Tinoco, 1994, 2011). Participant-experimenters would probably
be advantageous in such a situation, or would at least be useful in
anticipating design flaws that would likely arise with other
participants.

Clearly, experimental control is essential for having some
certainty that our effects are genuine, and this will usually be at the
expense of ecological validity (as Winkelman pointed out), but, beyond
just striving for a well-controlled naturalistic study, we can also gain
a great deal from exploring the personal dimensions of our subject
matter. I'm not asking that everyone in our field become Platonic
maniacs--as illuminated by Etzel Cardena (2011) last night in the
opening keynote address for this convention--but I am saying that we
have something to gain from a Jamesian radical empiricism. William James
reminds us that, "to be radical an empiricism must neither admit
into its construction any element that is not directly experienced, nor
exclude from them [sic] any element that is directly experienced"
(James, 1912/1996, p. 42).

And as we progress next year into the centenary of James's
posthumous Radical Empiricism, we should recall his noble first-person
approach to his subject matter, unafraid as he was to experiment with
"the atmosphere of heaven" and partake of nitrous oxide, and
further still he was also unafraid to write about it in the Varieties of
Religious Experience (James, 1901/1958). As Ralph Metzner (2005, p. 27)
says about radical empiricism, "it is not where or how observations
are made that makes a field of study 'scientific,' it is what
is done with the observations afterwards."

Now, some of you here may find this radical epistemology
challenging, and for others I may well be preaching to the converted,
but I would like to encourage and celebrate first-person science as a
means of approaching anomalous phenomena. It needn't be everyone
adopting this approach, and neither can nor should it be used to
investigate all phenomena (e.g., near-death experience). Nor is this
approach a replacement for objective methodologies but rather an
augmentation of our current epistemology.

Take the phenomena of lucid dreaming. While lucid dreams have long
been reported as anomalous experiences, they were for many years
considered by some researchers to be delusionary, impossible, and absurd
(e.g., Malcolm, 1959) and they were largely thought to be
"micro-awakenings" (Foulkes, 1974) until the late 1970s. Lucid
dreams weren't actually widely accepted as real by the scientific
community until Stephen LaBerge taught himself to lucid dream to such an
extent that he learned that he could control his eye movements and
demonstrate to an objective observer that he was actually consciously in
control of his dreams whilst in a physiologically verified sleep state
(LaBerge, Nagel, Dement, & Zarcone, 1981). Perhaps once we can
demonstrate psi ourselves in our personal encounters with critics, they
may well also take a different view, perhaps not.

Do You Do Voodoo? The Perks and Perils of Going Native

Another parallel example comes from the field of anthropology,
which witnessed a revolution of methods in the 1970s that, in
particular, had a profound effect on many anthropologists' view of
ostensibly paranormal phenomena (Luke, 2010a). During the late 1960s and
early 1970s a number of anthropologists, such as Harner (1968),
Kensinger (1973), and, controversially, Castaneda (1968), passed over
the objective threshold that had been maintaining prejudices in their
field, and, rather than merely observing, began participating in native
rituals and actively journeyed into altered states of consciousness,
particularly those utilising psychedelic plants. As a result they
finally transcended the etic-emic divide that had separated researchers
ethnocentrically from a deeper understanding of their subject matter,
and the technique of participant-observation was finally fully embraced
with respect to anomalous phenomena (Luke, 2010a). For the first time in
the history of anthropological research, researchers not only
participated but actually "went native" and reported having
transpersonal experiences (they had usually kept them quiet until this
time), and, in the process, transformed themselves, their data, and
their methodology.

After apparently witnessing a spirit leave a body during a healing
ceremony with the Ndembu of Zambia in 1985, Edith Turner (1992, 1994)
strongly urged for a deeper participatory approach to anthropology and
the ostensibly paranormal, chastising those who merely participated in a
"kindly pretence." Turner's call to ethnographers was
also echoed across all fields of consciousness research at that time,
and Harman (1993) warned that, "the scientist who would explore the
topic of consciousness ... must be willing to risk being transformed in
the process of exploration" (p. 193, italics in original).

Nevertheless, such advances in the understanding of the
natives' rituals and their belief in magic presented some problems
within the established academic doctrine, and the ontological boundary
the anthropologists crossed once they had gone native often caused their
peers to immediately question the validity of their experience
(MacDonald, 2001). So, despite the epistemological advances forged
through participantobservation, the spectre of the "removed"
ethnographer still persists in haunting researchers (Turner, 2006),
continuing to give rise to a fear of ostracism within the
anthropological community (Winkelman, 1983; Young & Goulet, 1994).

For instance, Richards (2003) recently testified to this fear by
announcing that all the anthropologists she knew had had paranormal
experiences themselves, but that their so-called scientific training
demanded that they explain away the ostensibly psi phenomena as
coincidence (more randomania) or psychosomatic healing--itself a notion
held to be superstitious until recently. One theory put forward for this
fearful data-burying is that the culturally acceptable arguments for
paranormal phenomena given by Western scientists serve to alleviate the
anxiety induced by the possibility that magic may be real (Van de
Castle, 1974), a notion which anthropologists, parapsychologists, and
even magical practitioners themselves (Luke, 2007) find equally
difficult to accept. Charles Tart (1984), Harvey Irwin (1985), Stephen
Braude (1993) and others have written at length about this matter in our
own field and the problem inherent in both our acknowledged and
unacknowledged fears of psi that may not only hold back participants but
also researchers and, inevitably, the data we collect.

First Person Parapsychology: Being Subjective Is the New Objective

Experience tells us, however, that a first-person approach can help
us to deal with both the fear of psi and with the restrictions of an
ethnocentric perspective. Furthermore, we have heard a good deal today
about altered states of consciousness, and it is hard to deny their
relevance and importance to the field of parapsychology (Luke, 2011a).
They are indeed, as Professor Cardena (2011) so eloquently reminded us,
a many splendored thing, but lurking within the purely detached and
objective observation of these states lies what Grof (2008) calls
pragmacentrism: an inherent inability to fully understand the state
itself without having experienced it oneself. And despite having sounded
the revolutionary call for state-specific sciences some 40 years ago,
Charles Tart's (1972, 1998, 2000) hugely important demand for
studying altered states on their own terms has all but been ignored.

There are exceptions, of course, in various pockets of the study of
consciousness, and following from his work investigating the cognitive
psychology of so-called hallucinations through the use of
ayahuasca--both by himself and by others--Benny Shanon (2002, 2003)
points out the basic limitations of not being inside one's subject
matter: Few people would trust a deaf person to teach us about music.
The same principle goes for altered states and their phenomena, be they
form constants (Luke, 2010b) or psi. Indeed, in the study of altered
states, some researchers (e.g., Strassman, 2001) indicate that it is the
researchers' duty to go first so that they can anticipate the kind
of states that participants may have, leading to increased awareness and
insight into difficult experiences. Charles Laughlin (1992) illuminates
the issue of pragmacentrism further by delineating the differences
between monophasic and polyphasic cultures, that is, respectively, the
difference between cultures that primarily regard the ordinary waking
consciousness as the only true and trusted state, compared to those
cultures that recognise the importance, even the necessity, of other
states of consciousness for their own psychological well-being and for
the well-being of their community and habitat.

So I am asking for the reclamation of the anomalistic experience
itself from the arm's length stylisation of it as a dysfunctional
dimension of being human. I am not saying that the inclusion of
first-person science is essential in all domains of our research, but it
may certainly be advantageons in some areas. As I have pointed out, it
can help us transcend the intellectual gulfs of ethnocentrism,
pragmacentrism, and the fear of the implications arising if our theories
are actually right. Getting inside our subject matter may also be an
ethical imperative and, additionally, may have a positive transformative
and cathartic effect upon us as researchers, perhaps leading to better
insights and an opening up of our creative potential. For example, the
sociologist and anthropologist of mediumship Charles Emmons (in press)
actually went all the way and trained as a medium, pointing out that
this allowed him to better appreciate the experiences of his research
participants.

Furthermore, given the very special subject matter of
parapsychology and the near-inescapable trickster element of
experimenter psi that plagues the very interpretation of any findings
(e.g., Stanford, 1981; Hanson, 2001), then N-of-one self-experimentation
the likes of which many parapsychologists have attempted (e.g., de
Pablos, 1998, 2002; Radin, 1990, 1990-1991; Schmidt, 1991, 1997, 2000;
Tart, 1983; Thalbourne, 2006) at least circumvents this issue somewhat
and gives us some faith in the source of our results.
Self-experimentation also guarantees a number of factors that may be
found to be problematic with other-than-us participants, such as
motivation and honesty (e.g., Luke & Zychowicz, 2011), security, and
adherence to the protocol. Further, Thouless (1960) suggested that psi
self-experimentation could help with getting more reliable results. Such
"participatory science," as Emmons calls it (in press), can
also help us personally determine if particular anomalous experiences
are genuinely paranormal. Ultimately too, a firstperson approach may
help us discover new ways in which we can utilise the phenomena we
study, so that we are not forever burdened with an almost entirely
theoretical science that, ironically, is in need of a comprehensive
theory, and we may instead begin to discover new applications for the
useful implementation of the phenomena we study.

Perhaps too, parapsychology, like transpersonal psychology can have
the additional aim of being hermeneutic (Daniels, 2005) and reach for an
emphasis on understanding and interpretation, thereby living up to the
psychological dimension of its name, love it or loathe it, and not just
striving for physical or physiological levels of explanation.
Ultimately, if there is a central theme here it is merely that we should
"get inside" our subject matter. Anyway, seeing as we are
running late, and I've been talking all day, the next subject
matter of the evening is to enjoy ourselves and have a drink, so I hope
you both get inside your subject matter and let your subject matter get
inside you; the drinks are served. Thank you.

Acknowledgments

With thanks to Karolina Zychowicz and Anna Hope for their feedback
on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

de Pablos, F. (1998). Spontaneous precognition during dreams:
Analysis of a one-year naturalistic study. Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research, 62, 423-433.

de Pablos, F. (2002). Enhancement of precognitive dreaming by
cholinesterase inhibition: A pilot study. Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research, 66, 88-102.

Emmons, C. (in press). Spirit mediums in Hong Kong and the United
States. In J. Hunter and D. Luke (Eds.), Talking with the spirits:
Ethnographies from between the worlds. Brisbane, Australia: Daily Grail.

Tart, C. T. (1984). Acknowledging and dealing with the fear of psi.
Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 78, 133-143.

Tart, C. T. (1998). Investigating altered states of consciousness
on their own terms: A proposal for the creation of state-specific
sciences. Journal of the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of
Science, 50, 103-116.

Tart, C. T. (2000). Investigating altered states of consciousness
on their own terms: A proposal for the creation of state-specific
sciences. International Journal of Parapsychology, 11, 7-41.

Thalbourne, M. A. (2006). Kundalini and the output of a random
number generator. Journal of Parapsychology, 70, 302-333.